Tag: featured
On Writing What You Don’t Know By Sarah Penner
On Writing What You Don’t Know By Sarah Penner Of all the writing advice I’ve come across in recent years, here is the old adage I despise the most: write what you know. They tell us to “write what we know” for several reasons: the sense of authority that comes across on the page; the speed and […]
How I Found My Ideal Reader, My Agent
When I finished the final draft of the manuscript that became my debut novel If, Then (Random House, 2019), I had a lot of pie in the sky aspirations. I wanted a fantastic agent, a talented editor at an imprint I admired, and also something that felt crazy to even say out loud, readers. It […]
Humor Is Not an Official Literary Genre
Humor Is Not an Official Literary Genre by Vanessa A. Newman, M.S. Hogwash to that, I say emphatically! Can’t the written word engender laughter? Or would opponents argue that eliciting guffaws is simply a function of entertainment and thus not literary in nature. Psychology Today claims laughter is fundamental, but the setting is critical. In […]
A Story in Search of a Shape
Say you’re sitting on a hot story. Let’s make it a murder. Now raise the stakes and make it a murder you were involved in. What’s the best way to tell it? Far-fetched as it may seem, this premise is the story of the past fifty years of my life. Here’s one way to tell […]
Writing From The Underworld
Cassandra L. Thompson When I finally maneuvered my way into the writing world with my debut gothic fantasy novel, The Ancient Ones, I was graced with several opportunities to sit down and interview with different people. While I received many of the same questions – why vampires? Why ancient mythology? Perhaps the most frequently asked […]
The Author Who Predicted A Pandemic, Years Before Covid
When Susie Kearley from England started writing a book about a pandemic, she never imagined she’d live through one! I was just 16 when I penned the first draft of ‘Pestilence’. It was 1990, and I wanted to be a novelist. Inspired by the success of James Herbert’s Rats and similar stories around at that […]
Awesome
…You sure about that? My friend and fellow writer, Liz Flaherty did an article about words once. Her consideration of the word “ordinary” made me go right into Editor Nan mode and start thinking about words, how we use them, and how we misuse them. I confess I am a word nerd. It’s all my […]
Interview with Clara Falkenberg of The German Heiress by Anika Scott
About THE GERMAN HEIRESS Essen, 1946. Clara Falkenberg, once an iconic heiress, is on the run. With the city in ruins and her dear friend Elisa missing, Clara enlists the help of Jakob, a charming young racketeer with his own reasons for wanting to find Elisa. As the two join forces, it’s not long before […]
Finding Your Voice After 50
4 things you can (and should) start doing today With the completion of my manuscript, I closed my laptop, celebrated with a glass of Chardonnay, and sat back, prepared for the inevitable challenge of the Next Step on the road to publication—finding the elusive literary agent. For those of you not living in my bookish world, […]
Can Stories Change the World? By Sheila Athens
My favorite quote about writing is from playwright Tom Stoppard: “Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” I’ve always understood this quote to mean that the stories we write can change the world. In some cases, those changes are […]
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